Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Over time, organizations replicate, migrate, or add complexity within database systems, often times losing control of the quality of their data. When applications begin to fail because of invalid, corrupted, or out-of-date data, the free, GPL-licensed Talend Open Profiler can give data analysts, database administrators (DBA), and business users the ability to research data structures and improve data quality. Through the use of Open Profiler, users can be alerted to hidden inconsistencies and incompatibilities between data sources and target applications. Through data analysis, business users and technical analysts can communicate both data structure and content needs.

The KOffice team announces the availability of the ninth alpha release of KOffice 2.0. With KDE4 becoming more stable by the week, KOffice development is picking up at a fast pace and developers who previously had trouble keeping up are now getting active again, leading to a much increased rate of commits for KOffice. Both the NLnet sponsored Girish Ramakrisnan, who is working on OpenDocument support, and the KOffice Google Summer of Code students are delivering solid work.

Hector Ruiz is out as chief executive at Advanced Micro Devices as the struggling chip maker on Thursday reported its seventh consecutive quarter in the red to the tune of a $1.19 billion loss in the second quarter of this year. Dirk Meyer, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD's president and chief operating officer, has been elected by AMD's board to replace Ruiz as CEO, according to the company. Ruiz replaced Jerry Sanders as CEO in 2002 upon the AMD co-founder's retirement. Ruiz will stay on in a director's capacity at AMD, he said on Thursday's Q2 earnings call, where the news was announced at about 2 p.m., PT.

We love it when Batman defeats the Joker because we love to see the bad guys get their just desserts. But as enjoyable as it is seeing fictional villains lose, it’s far more satisfying when the bad guys get their comeuppance in real life. This is what just happened in a small but hopefully decisive way to the infamous Santa Cruz Operation.

In case you haven't noticed, the economy is collapsing. You can't afford to drive anywhere, and, even if you could, you may not have a GM car to drive there for much longer. Some of you may be losing your houses, and the mortgage companies that gave you that mortgage in the first place? IndyMac went down late last week and now the question of the day is which major national bank will follow it down.

With broadband speeds in South Africa improving at a steady pace (although still pricey) listening to commercial radio on PCs and laptops is becoming a lot easier. The problem is, however, that if you’re a Linux user most of the live streams provided by South Africa’s commercial radio stations are provided in Windows Media Format (.asx).

Even though SCO has suffered another legal defeat, the company looks like it has enough willpower, if not sense, to keep its legal losing streak going. On July 16th, Judge Dale Kimball ruled in favor of Novell in SCO vs. Novell and said that the maverick Unix company owed Novell $2.5-million for its Unix deals, and, oh, by the way, Novell, not SCO, really owns Unix. With no IP rights to Unix, it would appear that SCO's lawsuits against IBM, Novell, and Linux were done. Alas, the experts say "no."

Blind people generally use computers with the help of screen-reader software, but those products can cost more than $1,000, so they're not exactly common on public PCs at libraries or Internet cafes. Now a free new Web-based program for the blind aims to improve the situation.

A vendor of digital check scanners has updated its closed Linux drivers, releasing drivers for recent versions of Red Hat and Ubuntu. Digital Check can also supply custom drivers for device makers and OEMs, it says. Check scanners emerged after events on Sept. 11, 2001 grounded all commercial airplane flights in the U.S. for a week, explained Digital Check's VP of product management, Bruce Rennecker. "All checks in the U.S. stopped moving. The banking system had shut down. The Fed immediately notified banks not to worry, and to keep operating until they got trucks lined up. But that experience incented the government to stop the archaic practice of moving paper physically.

There have been several posts here about Linux in the law office, both as a server environment and as a workstation. My main concern with it on the desktop has always been the lack of native Linux applications that would be needed for lawyers, such as time and billing, financials, and case management.

The XFS filesystem is known to give good performance when storing and accessing large files. The design of XFS is extent-based, meaning that the bytes that comprise a file's contents are stored in one or more contiguous regions called extents. Depending on your usage patterns, some of the files contained in an XFS filesystem can become fragmented. You can use the xfs_fsr utility to defragment these files, thus improving system performance when it accesses them.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has labeled makers of the OpenBSD operating system a "bunch of masturbating monkeys", as part of a wider critique of what he said was self-centered behavior in the IT security industry. In an e-mail to the Linux kernel developer mailing list, Torvalds said a section of the security industry was dedicated to finding bugs in software only to publicize their findings and gain notoriety. The row erupted in the Gmane mailing list after a developer for the PaX Team, which patches the Linux kernel, accused Torvalds and other top Linux kernel developers of "covering up [the] security impact of bugs" by not clearly labeling them as security flaws.

Nathan Zale Dowlen objects to proprietary software, so when he opened his new law office, he outfitted it with Ubuntu Linux and open source software. Cost was the main factor in his decision at first, but he has since come to appreciate the security found in FOSS and the ease of use found with Ubuntu. Dowlen has used Linux and open source software since 2006, when he attended the Nashville School of Law, and had no trouble with compatibility, since "OpenOffice.org will open almost anything thrown at it." He recorded lectures with Audacity and even found that his "Linux based laptop did a better job of automatically finding printers on the school's wireless network than when it ran Windows."

In this second part of my survey I focus on the tools that achieve this new synthesis of arts. Alas, due to space constraints I am unable to include all the software I would like to have reviewed, but perhaps a future article will deal with those programs. Meanwhile, I present to my readers these brief profiles of Pd, Fluxus, and AVSynthesis. Each of these programs takes a different approach to the practical concerns of blending images (moving or still) with sound (realtime or recorded).

It is interesting to watch the activities of JTC1/SC34 as they go through the motions of processing activities related to OOXML, long after any serious justification for their continuation has ceased. That is the nature of bureaucracy — wind up their clockwork and watch the little soldiers go through their prescribed motions. Come back in an hour and they may be stuck in a corner or knocked over onto the floor. But they'll keep on moving their feet, back and forth, in small steps toward ends unknown and unknowable, the little senseless mechanical men.

At the beginning of its massive legal fight against Linux in 2003, The SCO Group Inc. imagined a day when companies like IBM, Novell Inc. and others would pay it large amounts of cash for alleged infringements on SCO-owned Unix code. Instead, even as those legal fights meander through U.S. courts, the tables were turned and SCO yesterday was ordered to pay $2.55 million to Novell for collecting Unix licensing revenue from Sun Microsystems Inc. that it wasn't entitled to collect.

Since I participate in the Brazilian group that analyzed the OpenXML, I have the distinct impression that a hidden agenda have guided the decisions of the JTC1 and more recently the SC34 at ISO. Not so long ago, the major evidence for me was the number of countries that changed their votes in the last days OpenXML voting, signaling a major political agreement for the approval of standard, but now, a few months later more strange thing is happening.

Remodeling? Like free software? If you answer "yes" to both questions, try taking Sweet Home 3D for a spin. The open source, cross-platform 3-D interior design application is simple to use and simple to learn. You don't create individual objects in Sweet Home 3D like you do in a modeling app like Blender; instead you focus on the layout and design of the rooms themselves.

There are few pieces of software that users touch more often than office productivity suites. The market monster is, of course, Microsoft Office, with the lion's share of all licenses for office productivity tools. But two trends -- open source and cloud computing -- are offering a new generation of Office alternatives that businesses may want to consider.

It didn't take the enterprising community of Asus Eee PC users long to come up with some great tweaking tools for this Linux-based ultra-low-cost laptop. Just a few weeks after the official launch of Eee PC, the first tweaking utilities started to appear on the EeeUser forums. Today, you can choose from a wide selection of tools that can help you to customize your tiny laptop and make your work on it more efficient.